Foreign ringed birds here in the UK!

The office here gets a lot of records of foreign-ringed birds that have been found in this country and part of my job every week job is to process a batch of these records and send the information to the ringers and finders.

This week's batch had three rather diverse reports; from Greenland, France and The Netherlands. The first was Sanderling 8223222 ringed at the Zackenberg Research Station in Greenland on 5th July 2007 and had been recaught by the Wash Wader Ringing Group at Wainfleet Marsh, Lincolnshire, on 30th August 2008. We have records of 66 foreign-ringed Sanderling in Britain and Ireland but this is the first from Greenland!

Similarly, we don't get many reports of foreign Nightingales and so far they have all been caught by BTO ringers, this latest was no exception. Ring number CB22174 is only the second from France and was found at Haddon Hall on 10th June 2008. In the past we have also had reports of one from Denmark (caught several times at a site in Cambridgeshire in different years), one from Spain and one from Guernsey.

Reports of foreign-ringed Green Sandpipers are even rarer - there have only ever been two: one from Germany was found in Basildon, Essex, under unknown circumstances, and one from Sweden was shot as a Bar-tailed Godwit in Kent. This latest bird was from The Netherlands, and was rather bizarrely hit by a car at Stainfield, Lincolnshire!